indicative of degrees of‘educability’. Dalal ( 2014 ) also notes that children are
continually referred to as belonging to a certain community, gender, caste, religion
or class and are rarely addressed as learners.
The negative attitudes towards children, the lack of faith in their abilities to learn
and the everyday focus on their class and social identities reveal that children are
viewed as‘non-epistemic’beings. Viewing the classroom as a social and relational
space, Majumdar and Mooij ( 2011 ) argue that the kind of relationship children
share with teachers and the kind of interactions they have, shapes classroom pro-
cesses—involving or excluding children from processes of learning. For instance,
when teachers attribute lack of performance to aspects inherent in children and their
social milieu, they provide sanction to class inequalities. Teachers are also seen to
demean the poor backgrounds of children even while transacting text lessons. Dalal
( 2014 ) observed that during the teaching of a lesson in environmental studies
(EVS), the text—written with the intention to include the experiences of children in
the classroom discourse—was instead used to humiliate the social milieu of chil-
dren. The examples given below illustrate this.
The chapter:‘The World in my Home’from the NCERT Environmental Science
textbook engages with issues of diversity such as gender, caste divide and honesty.
The text is written in a manner that seeks the participation of children, encouraging
them to talk about their experiences. Thefirst part of the chapter deals with a
common scenario at home where afight breaks out over the remote control of the
television. The teacher reads the text and the questions that are aimed at engaging
children in a conversation are as follows:“Do you have suchfights at home?”
Several children give mixed responses. The teacher ignores all of them and pro-
nounces her judgment on the children and their families:“You peoplefight on
anything and everything. What else do you do other thanfight?”
She moves on to the nest section of the text which encourages children to be
sensitive and truthful. The text alludes to the integrity of the main protagonist of the
story, who pays the correct amount of money for an ice cream even though
the shopkeeper asks for a lesser amount. The teacher reads the question given in the
textbook:“Would you also do such a thing?”This time too she answers on her own:
“No, you don’t do this”Abhishek intervenes:“Yes madam, we do”Dismissing him
she says:“You definitely cannot do this. I do not think there would be even one child
in your neighbourhood who would do such a thing”.
This classroom episode highlights how teachers tend to essentialise the values
and behaviours of children who come from poor families. Teachers’orientations
towards these children are driven by the stereotypical assumptions they hold about
them and about poverty.
As argued elsewhere, an overwhelming emphasis on archaic concepts of the
psychology of learning and individual differences during pre-service training con-
structs a frame within which students are perceived as dull, lazy and‘uneducable’
even as they struggle with alienating aspects of school environments—be it the
language or an irrelevant school curriculum. Concepts of‘slow learners’and‘low
IQ’, rampantly used in contemporary Indian classrooms, are‘naturalised’in the
430 P. Batra